Rapid response in a crisis
Building an omnichannel microsite through Agile development
During difficult times, it’s critical to focus on customers and customer experience.
We all remember when the business world quickly shuttered its doors at the beginning of COVID-19. Some of our first thoughts were around household supplies, yes. But it wasn’t long before many consumers began to worry about our access to money.
A leading national bank felt the sting especially hard as branches closed and call centers became inundated with customers needing to make transactions, inquiring about loans, and handling credit card issues. In addition, the bank was offering new programs customers needed to hear about, such as delayed credit card payments—anything to help customers out during this difficult time. And while the bank had robust online banking capabilities, many customers did not know how to use them.
So the bank decided to create a rapid response, omnichannel microsite to address customer needs: a one-stop, self-service portal with all the answers their customers sought across multiple product lines. Fortunately, Celerity's team was already in place working on other Agile development projects and they were rapidly able to shift gears and turn their attention to the bank’s customer-centric COVID response.
Services
Creating a customer experience to reassure customers the bank had their backs
Celerity partnered with the bank’s Enterprise Digital Team to build the rapid response microsite. Across the organization, team members from the client’s diverse lines of business worked together to provide accurate and meaningful information to the millions of customers facing financial impacts from the start of the pandemic throughout the crisis. Keeping up with the ever-evolving list of issues, from coronavirus-related identity theft to travel disputes to government relief, was a constant challenge.
By bringing leaders with divergent priorities together, the site grew considerably larger than originally anticipated, but it also addressed a broader array of customer challenges in the process, reinforcing the bank’s customer-first sensibilities. Leveraging the data collected in this broad and thorough discovery process, Celerity followed an Agile development approach to rapidly build an omnichannel, device-independent site that served as one of the bank’s primary modes of customer communication throughout the crisis.
Delivering an omnichannel site in just two weeks
The team’s Agile development approach resulted in a rapid response, making the site live in just two weeks. By early April 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, 50K bank customers were using the site each day to apply for credit cards, get car loans, make touchless transactions, transfer money, obtain bank statements, and ease their money worries.
In the first six months after the launch, Celerity completed more than 375 site updates. Celerity also optimized the system update process so that updates that previously took 3-5 hours to make now take less than an hour to push live. Our rapid response during a time of crisis turned into a big win for both Celerity and our client.
Mid March 2020
No online knowledge base for consumers and businesses being impacted by COVID
Overwhelming call volume in call center, resulting in mounting customer frustration
Site update process that takes 3-5 hours to complete
No information online about relief or assistance available to customers
Since
Full microsite prominently featured on the bank’s home page goes live April 6
Microsite addresses many questions that were flooding call centers, improving customer experience
New site process established, enabling updates to go live in under an hour
Dual language microsite containing critical COVID-related information getting 50K hits/day
Healthcare Services Provider
Delivering digital prototypes based on empirical evidence to reduce erosion and increase annual operating profit
Major National Credit Union